The Plot of the Don’t Eat the Candy Slot Machine

Do not play with dark forces! Not even with the undead Patrick! Although… give it a try, you might be lucky… to return home alive and with a bag of gold!

Mystery of the 32nd Highway

Every Halloween, children dress up as various monsters and go door-to-door asking for candy. Then, the little “skeletons,” “zombies,” and other “ghouls” just hang around the city. However, parents strictly forbid their kids from walking around the cemetery on Thirty-Second Street because all sorts of spooky things happen there!

And the moment of retribution has arrived…

It all started many years ago: a grave robber named Patrick decided to make a quick buck in this cemetery on Halloween. He got to “work,” getting ready to take money and jewellery from someone poor person’s coffin!

The vile thief, unfortunately for him, didn’t notice a freshly dug-up grave where another deceased person was to be buried in a couple of days. Patrick fell down and broke his neck.

Damned undead

The spirits of the cemetery sensed the death of the damned man who had been robbing graves for decades. They swooped down on him like vultures on a carcass! The spirits tore off Patrick’s head and replaced it with a pumpkin, then brought the unfortunate soul back to life with their magic.

Now, every Halloween, the thief rises from the ground in search of entertainment. The pumpkin-headed figure roams the cemetery, hoping to find some cheeky kids dressed as ghouls to play a game with them. His eerie presence serves as a reminder of the dangers of grave robbing, as he seeks to ensnare the unsuspecting victims in his spectral games.

Cursed candy

Patrick offers a selection of candies, inviting players to choose one and eat it, to test their luck. One candy contains a prize magic: the lucky person receives a magical lantern that glows with the spirits of the restless souls. Another candy holds special magic that materializes gold literally out of thin air. Patrick presents a whole bag of excellent candies, each imbued with magic that transforms into a reward: an all-seeing eye floating in a bottle of acid, an apple of decaying flesh that has become a home for a fat corpse worm, a voodoo teddy bear, and a skull that predicts the future.

However, there’s one candy that holds no magic at all – instead, it contains a teaspoon of cyanide. The twist is that players randomly select their treat. Upon eating their chosen candy, they might become rich, acquire a strange trinket, or find themselves moving to the cemetery, as the cyanide renders them slightly dead, making it difficult to live anywhere else but underground.

Tricky ghoul

After Patrick’s death, the cemetery quickly gained a notorious reputation. Rumours of the pumpkin-headed figure rising from the grave every Halloween spread throughout the city.

People began to avoid the graveyard, steering clear of it for miles and miles, leading to some years when Patrick would find himself quite bored. With an abundance of free time on his hands, the pumpkin-headed figure crafted a makeshift wagon, disguising himself as a wandering merchant. In this guise, he hoped to deceive naive townsfolk, who would never suspect that the seemingly harmless trader was, in fact, a cursed undead creature.

Winners and Losers

For a while, Patrick’s ruse worked. On festive nights, people flocked to the cemetery, believing they were part of a grand performance. They would choose a candy and pop it into their mouths.

Some were lucky, while others found themselves less fortunate—picking the cyanide or the skull that predicted the date of their death down to the minute, along with other bizarre trinkets that no decent person should even look at.

Time to set out after sweets and riches.

Wait, wait, you’re not actually planning to go to the cemetery by the thirty-second highway, are you?! Oh, darn, you probably will! If that’s the case, at least don’t eat those cursed candies. And if you decide to try your luck at getting rich with no effort, be prepared for surprises that might come crashing down on you instead of mountains of gold. Well, we hope you manage to rob Patrick blind and return home with pockets full of money…